Articulatory Dynamics of Quantity and Stress in Estonian Prosody

The Estonian ternary quantity system produces kinematic patterns that resemble stress, with longer, larger, and faster gestures in phonologically long vowels and their neighboring consonants.However, it remains unclear to what extent these effects reflect quantity rather than stress, since previous research has examined only quantity contrasts in word-initial syllables, the locus of stress in the native lexicon.This co-occurrence is thought to license an inverse temporal relationship between the stressed syllable and the following unstressed one, forming a metrical foot.Using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), we investigate quantity-stress interactions by (a) comparing stressed and unstressed syllables differing in vowel quantity word-initially and word-medially, and (b) probing the inverse timing pattern across a range of foot structures.Our analysis focuses on onset consonant gestures from eight native speakers.Results show that vowel quantity and stress share kinematic correlates, both shaping supra-laryngeal articulation, but do so with distinct temporal signatures.Quantity effects arise early and spill into overlapping consonant gestures, whereas stress effects emerge later and extend into post-tonic material.These patterns produce inverse timing relations without requiring the foot as their domain, instead suggesting partially overlapping articulatory domains for the two functions and motivating a mu-gesture account of their coordination.